While virtually all the historians who have discussed the reasons behind Hitler’s decision to declare war on the US agree that he was resigned to an imminent entry of the US into WW 2, so far no one has made a plausible case for one particular political or military move by Washington tipping him over the edge. From the “Destroyers-for-Bases” deal of September 1940 to the de-facto abolition of the 1939 Neutrality Law an already pro-Allied Roosevelt administration got progressively more and more involved in the war against Nazi Germany while still claiming the status of a neutral. Assessing which of these steps was decisive in predisposing the German leader towards a declaration of war is a major challenge, since no document for internal consumption summarising his thoughts on the matter has ever emerged.

A detailed examination of military and diplomatic records, together with his acolytes’ personal diaries indicates that it was the passing of the legislation which gutted the US Neutrality Law (November 13th) which is most likely to have put him in a frame of mind where war with the US was seen as something inevitable, since this guaranteed the imminent arrival of US civilian shipping in the NW approaches of the UK.

This chapter intends to address how Hitler’s views on the US and Japan had evolved in the years prior to 1941. Despite the fact that his assessment of the USA in particular can be examined through a multitude of sources, many historians have chosen to limit themselves to a number of well-known value judgements from public wartime speeches. Unsurprisingly, these dwell extensively on the supposed “racial inferiority” of contemporary Americans and on the “Jewish influence” in the American centres of power. In similar fashion, his value judgement of the Japanese are usually reduced to his supposed “infatuation” with the Japanese warrior culture. A more extensive analysis of the available sources (speeches of the 20’s, records of private conversations, manuscripts from his own hand) quickly reveals a more complex picture. The Americans are regarded as the future rival of the new Germany, but also admired for their technological prowess, economic muscle and racist legislation. The Japanese, on the other hand are not accorded the same unstinted praise; his interest in them develops only in close synchronicity with every step Japanese governments of the 1930’s take which appears to indicate a lasting antagonism with the Anglo-American powers.